By conserving and restoring mangrove forests, Solomon Islanders diversify their livelihoods while addressing climate change.

Mangrove forests furnish ecosystem services made all the more valuable by climate change. They protect coastal communities from storm damage, which may become even more important as the effects of climate change become increasingly evident. Like all plants, mangroves take up carbon dioxide, making the mangrove forest ecosystem a net store for carbon. Conserving and restoring mangrove forests may therefore play an important role in mitigating climate change. Mangroves further provide firewood, building materials and food for humans, as well as habitat and spawning grounds for fish. 

Tropical mangrove forests, such as this one in the Solomon Islands, provide food and livelihoods for rural communities and contribute vitally to the health and productivity of coral reefs and inland forests.
Photo: Anne-Maree Schwarz, WorldFish

Yet mangroves are being cleared or degraded at the alarming annual rate of 1-2% annually, their area declining by a third since the 1980s. Multiple pressures threaten the world’s remaining 15-18 million hectares, including pollution, fuelwood collection, land clearance for aquaculture and coastal development, and natural disasters.

The ability of terrestrial forests in the tropics to sequester carbon has spurred the quantification of this ecosystem service and the trading of carbon offset credits, through which buyers offset their own carbon emissions and owners of forested land are rewarded for the carbon their trees sequester. Offset projects either protect existing forests, regenerate lost or degraded forests by planting trees, or both.

The project “Poverty alleviation, mangrove conservation and climate change: Carbon offsets as payments for mangrove ecosystem services in Solomon Islands” explores whether mangroves can be included in such carbon offset projects. If replanting mangroves and using them sustainably can qualify poor rural communities along tropical coasts to link into the global carbon market, the income they earn may be invested for educational, health and conservation uses.

As trading and registry procedures are not yet well established for the nascent voluntary carbon offset market — especially for mangroves — local communities,  nongovernmental organizations and governments need a roadmap to show the way from identifying the ecosystem services that their mangroves provide to quantifying carbon sequestration, registering for credits and managing trust funds. The goal of the project is to provide that roadmap.

Photo: Alex Tewfik, Reefbase.

Funded by the Australian government through AusAID and led by the WorldFish Center, the project is the first of its kind in the Indo-Pacific. The clear title that Solomon Islanders often have to mangroves through customary marine tenure and long-standing chiefly systems potentially ensures strong local mechanisms and procedures to support this pioneering approach to establishing a system of payment for coastal environmental services. The project studies contrasting sites in three of the nine provinces of Solomon Islands. A site on the island of Ranonga in Western Province suffered a major earthquake and tsunami in 2007 that severely damaged previously intact mangroves.

The project reinforces community mangrove restoration already begun. A second site in Choiseul Province possesses one of Solomon Islands’ larger intact tracts of mangroves, which is adjacent to a community-run conservation area that encompasses a terrestrial forest. A third site in Malaita Province is heavily utilized by the residents of the country’s most populous island. The contrast among the study sites will maximize the applicability of project findings to other threatened mangrove ecosystems in the Indo-Pacific.

Mangrove restoration at the community level in the estern Province of Solomon Islands. Photo: Anne-Maree Schwarz, WorldFish

WorldFish’s key partner in the project is the Ministry of Environment, Conservation and Meteorology, which is supported by nongovernmental organizations working on complementary projects. The partners specifically work to

• determine the ecosystem services that mangrove forests provide to rural Solomon Islanders,
• build stakeholder and community awareness and capacity through workshops and the preparation of educational materials,
• estimate the carbon storage potential of  the sites using remote sensing data and ground truthing,
• review offset market case studies and assess the potential for mangrove forests’ inclusion in trading schemes, and
• work with the Solomon Islands government to determine policy about engaging communities with the international carbon offset market.

Tropical mangrove forests connect sea and land and play a critical role in the health and productivity of coral reefs and inland forests. As such, their conservation and restoration extends environmental benefits to these neighboring ecosystems.

By offering a hand up instead of a handout, the project aims to empower Solomon Islanders to climb out of poverty even as they adapt to climate change and contribute to mitigating this global challenge.